Category: health

I wrote out a long post on this because its Saturday and I like to talk, even through text. If you want the solution that I found to connecting Jawbone UP to IFTTT click here or scroll to the bottom of this post. If you have nothing better to do go ahead and read the whole post, see if I care (hint: I do, please read my words, pretty please).

Getting more and more cyborg

Recently I participated in a study conducted by ASU on the Jawbone UP wristband. As a result of doing a variety of tasks from: taking a survey, to folding towels, to walking in a hallway, to running, and a few other things; I was given an UP wristband. Thus began my entry into a movement loosely known as the Quantified Self. I will go into way more detail as I use the device more, but suffice it to say I am hooked and it is helping me move around more and track what I am eating.

Sharing your Steps

One of the neatest features I learned about the wristband, and its iPhone app also called UP, is that Jawbone has an API that allows other services to interact with it. So if you already use an app to track your running you can have it synchronize with UP. The really cool part about this is that you can connect UP with a web service called If This Then That or IFTTT.

IFTTT allows you to connect a wide variety of web services to do a variety of things automatically for you with Recipes. For example you can connect Facebook to Dropbox, and anytime someone uploads a photo and tags you in it IFTTT will send a copy of that photo to your Dropbox.

With UP and IFTTT you can set it up so that when you hit your steps goal for the day. Or you can have a Google Spreadsheet created that gets updated with your nutritional information for each new day to give a tally of how you have been eating.

Setting up the Connection between IFTTT and UP

To setup IFTTT and UP you should just go to the IFTTT website or iPhone app and connect them in the Channel section.

However there is a possibility that you will try to set up the connection from within the UP iPhone app in the App Gallery section. If you do this the services will not connect for some reason that is beyond my purview of knowledge, but trust me when I say that it will not work and further cause you pain and agony to resolve. Unless you read this post first and learn from my mistake and pain, and in the end find joy!

How not to connect UP and IFTTT and how to fix that mistake

As you can guess by now I went into the UP iPhone app went to the App Gallery, clicked on the IFTTT option, entered my IFTTT login data, and accepted the connection. Then I went to the IFTTT iPhone app to start creating some Recipes, but when I selected the UP option it was still greyed out. No problem I thought I will just give it my UP login info, and we will be off to the races. After I clicked on the Accept button the IFTTT app replied that they could not Connect the app to UP.

So I called Jawbone to make sure everything was cool with my account. They answered the phone quickly, and had be delete and reinstall both apps. No change to my situation and no additional help from Jawbone.

So I hit up IFTTT on twitter and they gave me the support@ifttt.com email which took a day to respond only to ask me to reinstall both apps. If you recall this is not a working solution.

So I was already in Dante’s fifth circle and now headed straight to the seventh.

I went onto the Jawbone message boards and got some great encouragement but no solutions.

Finally I walked myself back through the setup process and realized that in the UP iPhone app the IFTTT app still had a green checkmark next to its name in the App Gallery. My suspicion was that I needed to remove this connection but no one could give me an answer on how to do this. After doing a Google search I found this page https://jawbone.com/kb/articles/432.html which near the bottom lists how to remove an app from the UP app.

So without further ado I give you my solution to getting UP and IFTTT to play nice with each other. Enjoy.

Resolving connection issue with UP and IFTTT

1. On your iPhone go into the UP app.
2. Click on the three bar button in the upper left corner
3. Click on Settings
4. Click on Privacy & Sharing
5. At the bottom of this page will be all Apps you have added in the UP gallery. To remove click on the minus (-) sign on the left side of the App name that you want to remove, in this case IFTTT.
6. A delete button will appear to the right of the App name. Click on that to remove the App from the UP app.
7. The App should now be removed but I did find that I had to exit the UP app a few times and redo this process to get it to completely remove itself from the UP app.
8. Once this has been removed you need to go to the IFTTT app or website and connect to UP via the channel section. Once you do this UP and IFTTT will be connected and you can rock on.

This was a pretty long winded article for just a short and simple resolution but I wanted to point out how difficult this was to complete. If Jawbone setup the UP app properly there would be a Delete option from within the app in the App Gallery. Simple fix.